Nevin Aladag
28 May - 30 Jul 2011
© Nevin Aladag
Stiletto - Dim the Lights, 6:07 min, 2011
Imprint on tin plate through dancing with stiletto-heeled shoes, tin plate
85 x 85 cm
Courtesy: Nevin Aladağ, Copyright: TANAS Berlin
Stiletto - Dim the Lights, 6:07 min, 2011
Imprint on tin plate through dancing with stiletto-heeled shoes, tin plate
85 x 85 cm
Courtesy: Nevin Aladağ, Copyright: TANAS Berlin
NEVIN ALADAĞ
Dim The Lights
28 May - 30 July, 2011
The title of Nevin Aladağ's TANAS exhibition, Dim The Lights 6:07min, precisely plots the coordinates of a majority of her recent works - many of them on view in Berlin for the first time. Aladağ offers various approaches to concepts of light and time, visualization and process, visibility and duration. And all this happens mostly on the basis of sound.
The video trilogy City Language, previously shown only at the 2009 Istanbul Biennale, perhaps most strikingly illustrates this integration of audio, video and temporality. Musical instruments are played not by human beings, but by wind and water. Ultimately the instruments are left to a flock of pecking pigeons and emancipate themselves completely from their players in a final step: resonant wooden sticks roll sonorously through the city, seemingly of their volition. The city speaks to us again in City Language II, this time filmed through a rear view mirror. Here Aladağ is able to portray a simultaneity of future, present and past: The now manifests itself in the object of the mirror itself, where the phrase "objects in mirror are closer than they appear", commonly used in Anglo-Saxon areas, is replaced by lyrics from contemporary pop songs. Due to the vehicle's speed, the stretch still lying ahead remains blurred and distorted. Only through the exterior mirror's spatial and temporal retrospective - through looking back into the past, in the actual sense of the word - does the world become focused and legible.
In contrast, Aladağ's Spiegelfamilien [Mirror Families] seem informed by the minimalist idiom of a Donald Judd or Robert Morris. And yet they clearly break with the minimalists' postualte of non-referentiality: in their unspectecular quadratic form, through configuration and arrangement, the large format mirror compositions manage to offer various anthropomorphic designs for the construct of family. The observer can now "insert" herself into the particular constellation and so, in a moment of actual and metaphorical self-reflection, gets the opportunity to take a snapshot of her personal and social position.
Dim The Lights 6:07 min supplies the title for Aladağ's exhibition and also leads us back to its starting point: on a metal plate, indentations made by stiletto heels during a dance performance are visible. Here the metal plate functions in a sense like the analog photographic process: the high heels made impressions on the material as the vestige of a moment, exactly the way a ray of light generates a photochemical reaction on a negative and testifies to something that was there. Aladağ presents the reverse side of the metal plate, the indentations raised toward us corresponding to the positive photograph. In the work Dim The Lights 6:07 min, as well as in the entire exhibition, processes that are conveyed through or by sound find a visual form that accords a central place to temporality.
Aladağ's latest object is a knotted macramé work made from wire cable. Here the artist offers an unusual look, in terms of both materials and aesthetics, at a cultural technique normally viewed in the context of textile manufacturing. The knotted patterns of her macrmaé as visualizations of the pattern integral to the wire cable: as in any cable, each individual fiber consists of different strands that in cross section yield a certain pattern. Aladağ imitates this microscopic structure in the knotted piece, and so not only visualizes the artisanal activity, but also cleverly manages to give the cable's internal structure a visually comprehensible form using the material itself.
Dim The Lights
28 May - 30 July, 2011
The title of Nevin Aladağ's TANAS exhibition, Dim The Lights 6:07min, precisely plots the coordinates of a majority of her recent works - many of them on view in Berlin for the first time. Aladağ offers various approaches to concepts of light and time, visualization and process, visibility and duration. And all this happens mostly on the basis of sound.
The video trilogy City Language, previously shown only at the 2009 Istanbul Biennale, perhaps most strikingly illustrates this integration of audio, video and temporality. Musical instruments are played not by human beings, but by wind and water. Ultimately the instruments are left to a flock of pecking pigeons and emancipate themselves completely from their players in a final step: resonant wooden sticks roll sonorously through the city, seemingly of their volition. The city speaks to us again in City Language II, this time filmed through a rear view mirror. Here Aladağ is able to portray a simultaneity of future, present and past: The now manifests itself in the object of the mirror itself, where the phrase "objects in mirror are closer than they appear", commonly used in Anglo-Saxon areas, is replaced by lyrics from contemporary pop songs. Due to the vehicle's speed, the stretch still lying ahead remains blurred and distorted. Only through the exterior mirror's spatial and temporal retrospective - through looking back into the past, in the actual sense of the word - does the world become focused and legible.
In contrast, Aladağ's Spiegelfamilien [Mirror Families] seem informed by the minimalist idiom of a Donald Judd or Robert Morris. And yet they clearly break with the minimalists' postualte of non-referentiality: in their unspectecular quadratic form, through configuration and arrangement, the large format mirror compositions manage to offer various anthropomorphic designs for the construct of family. The observer can now "insert" herself into the particular constellation and so, in a moment of actual and metaphorical self-reflection, gets the opportunity to take a snapshot of her personal and social position.
Dim The Lights 6:07 min supplies the title for Aladağ's exhibition and also leads us back to its starting point: on a metal plate, indentations made by stiletto heels during a dance performance are visible. Here the metal plate functions in a sense like the analog photographic process: the high heels made impressions on the material as the vestige of a moment, exactly the way a ray of light generates a photochemical reaction on a negative and testifies to something that was there. Aladağ presents the reverse side of the metal plate, the indentations raised toward us corresponding to the positive photograph. In the work Dim The Lights 6:07 min, as well as in the entire exhibition, processes that are conveyed through or by sound find a visual form that accords a central place to temporality.
Aladağ's latest object is a knotted macramé work made from wire cable. Here the artist offers an unusual look, in terms of both materials and aesthetics, at a cultural technique normally viewed in the context of textile manufacturing. The knotted patterns of her macrmaé as visualizations of the pattern integral to the wire cable: as in any cable, each individual fiber consists of different strands that in cross section yield a certain pattern. Aladağ imitates this microscopic structure in the knotted piece, and so not only visualizes the artisanal activity, but also cleverly manages to give the cable's internal structure a visually comprehensible form using the material itself.